Music

Big news on the hillbilly front these days is that some a&r type at Koch is suddenly doing a really good job of luring me into not hating alt-country. More big news is that I finally realized that the reason Blake Shelton's Barn & Grill is so much more alive and less puritan than all those older albums I remember by him is that he and Ricky Van Shelton are two different people. And the final news is that Nashville Star alumnus Miranda Lambert's big-label debut opens with a track that screams "Screaming Blue Messiahs," and Lee Ann Womack's current hit sure does sound a whole lot like "Little Green Apples" by O.C. Smith (not to be confused, then or now, with O.B. McClinton or O.V. Wright).